Trying to make a design really sing

SEVENTEEN years ago, as a newly elected councillor in the City
of St Kilda, I was shown a file of oldish drawings for a multi-deck
car park between the Upper Esplanade and Jacka Boulevard on the
land known as the triangle site. When asked, the manager explained
wearily: "We get a proposal for that land every 10 years or
so."

The triangle site is to the north of Luna Park and holds the
Palais Theatre on its southern boundary. Sloping down to Jacka
Boulevard from the Upper Esplanade, it's a desultory, partly
grassed edge leading to a mass of car parking and asphalt and the
foreshore beyond. The Palace nightclub, which sat adjacent to the
Palais, was burnt down some time ago, so the Palais is the only
building on the site. It is this land that is only part way through
the opera known as Development in St Kilda.

Apart from the natural beauty of the sea and the horizon, the
character of St Kilda's foreshore is a mixed bag, with the really
important contribution having been made by an Italian engineer,
Carlo Catani, early last century. Catani's much-valued (although
often appallingly restored) work in creating gardens, a romantic
little bridge, a clock tower and some low walls in volcanic rock
defining pathways has become the dominant aesthetic in the design
by Ashton Raggatt McDougall, the lead architects in the present
project.

Central to approaching a design for this site is deciding how to
move up the slope from the casualness of the seafront to reach the
highly urban Upper Esplanade. And here we see the tradition that
Catani took his work from  the pleasure gardens of 19th
century Italy  in the making of a series of terraces facing
onto the sea and rising to meet the city at the Upper
Esplanade.

The slope and shape of the site are such that the winning
proposal is, it must be said, incredibly difficult to grasp. To
understand the complexity of level changes required to respond to
the land and seafront, and to the planning and urban design
requirements, requires some hours of fairly intense inquiry and
that is possibly why the widespread concern in the local community
hits on the number of shops as central to people's complaints.

It is easier to label it all Chadstone by the Sea than to really
come to grips with how the proposal works and what it offers as an
exhilarating new piece of St Kilda. There are five buildings in
this plan, the larger scale buildings are located on the site of
the old Palace and to the rear of the Palais, while those further
away from the old Palace footprint are low-level buildings. Four of
them read as pavilions embedded in the terraces. Behind the Palais
is the eight-storey Nolan building holding a gym, hotel and nine
cinemas. And here we see the architectural modus operandi: the work
builds on contemporary culture and historical study and uses
references that make the buildings complex to read but joyful, even
entertaining, on casual viewing.

There will always be a difficulty in making a building opposite
Luna Park look as light and sketchy as Luna Park does, with its
rail tracks rolling through the sky, so the architects have used a
Sydney Nolan sketch of Luna Park and turned it into a black graphic
in rolled steel that itself rolls above and around the white
glowing box of the Nolan building. So the building is not the major
object, it's the skeleton of the sketch that is the major object.
This is creating, for the first time in a century, the visual
typology that St Kilda sees as its heritage, but has never managed
to build on.

On the footprint where the Palace once stood is the Green
building with plants growing up its facades carefully designed and
tended by Patrick Blanc, the French artist who made the walls of
the Musee Quai Branly into a vertical botanic garden on the banks
of the Seine. Again, this idea of melding the building and the
terrain has the inherent loopyness, the wackiness that St Kilda
should embrace.

Fronting the forecourt of the Palais is the Linden Contemporary
Art Gallery by Lyon Architects. The early work on the Linden had a
squished roller-coaster roof that has been drearily flattened in
the present drawings. The base of Linden repeats the famed facade
of Leo's in Fitzroy Street in that it spells out St Kilda in
brickwork across the front.

The terraces that form the basis of ARM's design are grassed
gardens that, from the Upper Esplanade, are below the eye level of
the horizon line. The idea is that we can walk through the site
from the upper to the lower levels and all these places and spaces
are public, with the design of the footpaths as carefully
considered as the gardens, steps, plazas and squares that link
around the project.

Crucial urban design achievements in this project are the
activation of Cavill Street and Jacka Boulevard. Jacka Boulevard is
particularly important, with widened footpaths, a new treed centre
median, on-street parking and shops, to make it an old-fashioned
beachfront high street. The design offers 16,600 square metres of
public open space out of a total 25,000 square metres, but will
that prove enough for the opera to reach its finale?

Dimity Reed is a Melbourne architect, former RMIT professor
of urban design and former St Kilda councillor.

1202090417005-theage.com.auhttp://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/trying-to-make-a-design-really-sing/2008/02/05/1202090417005.htmltheage.com.auThe Age2008-02-06Trying to make a design really singDimity ReedOpinion